Monday, January 20, 2014

One of my Harvard graduate school pals, long ago, wasn’t happy about the job market for new PhDs. In particular, he was disgusted by the prospect of taking an adjunct teaching job. "I'd rather eat out of a garbage can," he said.

Oh well, I've been eating
out of garbage cans for about twenty years, and at about as many different
schools, all of them run by presidents who, if you hang around them for more
than five minutes, will give you a speech about how education is opening the doors
of opportunity for all.

So, for the coming
semester, I'll be eating out of garbage cans provided by Fordham University,
Westchester Community (SUNY), and LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). The fare
is of variable quality, but never more than what $3800 per course, with no
benefits, can buy. I'm better off than many of my brothers and sisters in the
"majority faculty," by the way, who
make on average $2700 per course. I suppose there's
a sort of cost-of-living bonus for foragers in the NYC metro area.

I've come to think of
myself as a Trash Bear, one of those degraded bruins who rummage through the
town dump, or through suburban trash cans. They seem to survive pretty well,
and there are more of them now than ever. Though they were clearly not
"naturally selected" to do so, they successfully adapted to new and
unnatural conditions, and are now able to survive by foraging, often ranging
over great distances, for meager resources.

Now, can they
organize?

I hope so, because
my strengthening conviction is that it’s going to be trash bears, not pandas,
who save higher education. Pandas, of course, are full-time tenure track—but
particularly tenured—faculty, exquisitely adapted to a specific environment in
which they depend on huge quantities of rare bamboo and the occasional boiled
egg and maybe a little glass of sherry. They are highly specialized mammals,
and seriously cute.

Their habitat is
being destroyed at an unprecedented rate, their bamboo groves replaced by huge
stainless steel buildings which house 1) The Student Counseling and Loan
Center, 2) the Office for Loan Compliance, 3) the Dean's Office for Deanly
Affairs, and 4) the Provost's Command Post.

How can these pandas
be saved? They do not wander far from the sweetness of their bamboo, and
perhaps do not see the devastation that rolls toward them. But we, the
wide-ranging trash bears, we know the lay of the land, and can plan
accordingly. If Service Employees International Union (SEIU) or
similiar strategies in higher education organizing
are successful, bringing solidarity to this highly dispersed foraging
population, it will certainly change the terms of the "education
reform" debate, focusing on the link between decent higher ed outcomes and
decent faculty working conditions. That should be good for all the animals.

Here is the key:
part-time faculty can organize anywhere--under whatever state law pertains, and
in public and private universities—but, among the pandas, only those in the
public institutions can do so: a result of the Supreme Court's 1980 Yeshiva University decision, in which
full-time faculty at private institutions were designated "management."

Pandas, already
declining in number, have been divided into two distinct and even smaller
populations by Yeshiva, and this raises the specter of "minimal
viability": at some point they won't be able to reproduce. But trash
bears? No minimal viability there: they've been growing in number for forty
years. And ask yourself, by the way, is any court likely to declare that
part-timers are part of "management"?

In the past, it's true,
trash bears have often foraged alone but, as their numbers have grown, and
their travels have become more frequent and wide ranging--through private and
public and even for-profit higher ed garbage cans--they are becoming more
capable, and increasingly more willing, to share information and resources, and
to plan ahead, with others of their kind.

That's my view, and
I think it's in sync with SEIU organizing campaigns for part-time adjunct
faculty. In a recent NYT article, Adrianna Kezar, director of
the University of Southern California’s Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty
and Student Success, was quoted as saying that “The S.E.I.U. strategy has the
momentum right now.” She also said “And we know that unionizing leads to pay
increases and at least the beginnings of benefits.”

More on that SEIU "momentum": That would be Adjunct Action, a national
contingent organizing campaign with a great track record beginning in the
Washington D.C. metro area, with SEIU’s Local 500, which now represents
part-time adjuncts atGeorge
Washington University—where I got my first
degree—American
University,Georgetown University,
and Montgomery College. More recently, Tufts
University and Lesley College (Boston metro region) are active, as are
University of LaVerne and Loyola Marymount, and Whittier College (Los Angeles
metro). And now, we’re seeing Adjunct Action at work in New York State: stay
tuned.

Most higher ed faculty
aren't pandas, and to pretend otherwise is a disservice to all faculty, and to
students, and to the future of higher education itself. Unless we are able to
understand our own condition, and to accept the truth of it, we'll hardly be
able to fight for better things.

Now, what's with all my
trash talking here?

So, two weeks ago, at the American Philological Association's annual meeting
in Chicago, I participated in an excellent panel entitled “Contingent
Labor in Classics: The New Faculty Majority?” My contribution
was a version of the trash bear/panda theme I’m playing with here—I also tossed in
some language about “monstrous hybrids” that I thought would be appealing to
classicists, and which reflects some of the work that gets done in my own
field, cultural anthropology. Mutant unnatural hybrid adjunct/contingent swarm organizes. You get the idea.

While it was all received,
as intended, amiably, there was some unease as well. Some people clearly found
it divisive and, in fact, not just the "trash bear" idea, but the
idea of a "new faculty majority" itself: don't these ideas divide us?

I
don’t think so. The labels, the metaphors, do not divide us. Divisions have
been made. They are real. They have created real obstacles to communication and
movement. We’ve been divided. But the divisions have created a few
opportunities, I think, of which the most significant is the potential of part-time
adjunct faculty labor to build solidarity across institutions and throughout
"metro" and regional higher ed territory. Pandas can't do that yet,
but, who knows? When the day comes, I hope all the bears will have a big picnic.

Cringing Liberal Elite

Host Employers! Listen up!

"Host employers need to treat temporary workers as they treat existing employees. Temporary staffing agencies and host employers share control over the employee, and are therefore jointly responsible for temp employee's safety and health. It is essential that both employers comply with all relevant OSHA requirements."

David Michaels, PhD, MPH, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health